Chapter 7 - Leaving safe ground: Acknowledging the fluidity of human interaction

Summary

Between 1970 and 1973 Bastide published three collections of previously published articles along with some new materials. The three titles Le prochain et le lointain (1970), Le Rêve, la transe et la folie (1972), Estudos afro-brasileiros (1973) give us the farthest points reached in his thinking and writing. All examine, in some way or other, what happens when individuals and groups leave the ground of their familiar truths to get on alien grounds, far from group security and the presence of only well-known evils. Here we shall focus mainly on the texts that enable us to focus on the theory of religion that emerged from his specialized work. The general focus in his theorizing of religion runs along the lines of common concerns that took shape in his day. I can borrow a definition from Charles Long, the US historian of religion who has done most to further studies on the religion of Black Americans. Religion, he writes, is “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one's place in the world.” I see a convergence between this definition and two points essential to Bastide's work: people need to have “a place in the world” and they must actively “come to terms” with it.

“Calvinisme et racisme” take us to grounds much ploughed since Weber's Protestant Ethic, namely that of the cultural by-products of the doctrine and ethics at the heart of Calvinist churches. The doctrine of predestination, as found in the works of Augustine, Luther and Calvin, seemed in these churches to transform the dark secrets of the divine will into some luminous behaviour. God, like Jeremiah's potter, works on mankind as on clay, and rejects some of the pots he shaped for reasons known only to himself.